Is Rob Grant doing stand up now? The sheer mechanics of it are mind-boggling. But it sort of makes sense – big chunks of Incompetence and Fat could be categorised as observational comedy, and his personality seems rather suited to a stand up arena, even if his mannerisms and physicality don’t quite match up. Will he be retooling material from his books, or just doing readings, we wonder?

Well, we’re never ones to shirk from thorough research at G&T, and a quick Google search for “rob grant stand up” reveals this unsourced Wikipedia snippet:

Aside from his written oeuvre, Grant has recently taken up the mike on the stand-up comedy circuit with his wryly observed take on life.

Oh. That must have passed us by. But still, this is a curious notion, and one that I wish to see in action as soon as possible.

I can’t believe the lack of gags in the comments. *sigh* have we moved on or something?? No sign of words ‘fat’ or ‘cunt’ OR ‘but he’ll have to get out of his chair first’ or the like. Sheesh. Looks like I’ll have to make up a great joke on the spot right now…

A man walks into a bar (I just changed that from ‘bloke’ to ‘man’ because I was annoyed at myself, actually physically annoyed at myself for automatically using the word ‘bloke’ in relation to a bar when I would never use that word either in reality, in fiction or otherwise) and asks for a Scotch egg.

“Sorry, we don’t sell Scotch eggs,” said the barmaid, who was behind the bar, and a woman, and Scottish, because the bar was in Scotland – which was an important thing to remember as the Scots weren’t generally forgiving when it came to visitors forgetting the location of their current whereabouts, unless said ‘whereabouts’ happened to be somewhere other than in Scotland, in which case they tended to lose interest rather quickly – “however, now you’ve asked, would you like to come round the back and I’ll see what I can knock out for you?” The man smiled and nodded, being rather intrigued by this somewhat forward invitation. He followed the Scottish barmaid ’round the back’ where she opened a cupboard, removed a large egg from a worryingly battered eggbox, handed it to him and said “there you go, a Scotch egg!” with a funny little laugh that made the man think of badly blu-tacked tinsel falling off picture frames at one in the morning.

“Er,” said the man, for he did not want to offend. “Is there a problem?” the barmaid asked. “Well…” he began, and they just floated into the night, but not before he continued “…where’s the fucking breadcrumbs and sausagemeat, you bloody och aye the noo whore??” (and that is not racist for it is within a fiction, and in any case the Scottish are not a race, they wouldn’t even win a race that was being run FOR race awareness, probably) and to this she replied “oh, you seriously mean a SCOTCH egg! Due to your idiot English accent I thought you originally said ‘Crotch egg! Then I decided to spice things up due to my Scottish heritage by calling it a ‘Scotch’ egg in subsequent conversation.” and to his continually mounting horror, chancing a second glance at the box whilst listening to the faint ‘thwap’ of a door bolt being, well, bolted, he realised he had somehow found himself in a situation where he was about to insert a dozen vibrating eggs about his person and there wasn’t a bit of sausage in sight. “Punchline,” he said.

9th October in Hereford..
It would be rude of me not to go as it’s 5 minutes from my house…

No doubt, the handfull of local Dwarf fans will go along with a few regular theatre goers, a couple of confused old people, several drugged up hippy types expecting to hear ‘Electric Avenue’ and maybe some sheep..

Note, this is aimed at our local advertising (or lack of) rather that the show itself, which should be interesting and hopefully funny.

I mostly do observational stuff. I don’t talk about Red Dwarf per se, but I do a bit about SF conventions, and another bit about fantasy novels, that kind of thing. It depends on the audience – it’s weird how an audience has a kind of gestalt identity.

I think that’s an interesting point actually and one that has been neglected over the years..

I really enjoy the magazine and contributing has always been a pleasure. The new mag has certainly moved on judging by #1. I just wonder, over the years, if anyone has held back a tad when writing in and has anything ever been rejected purely on the grounds of being negative?

I know I had a few run-ins with Rory a long time ago over certain comments.

One piece of me says ‘yes’ there should be a balance, whilst part of me thinks that it’s the Fan Club team’s responsibility to promote just the ‘good’ side..

The way I’ve always seen it is that positive content is always guaranteeds because the majority of people running the club or contributing to the magazine will love new Dwarf or Dwarf related projects. There’s never a danger of negative opinion overshadowing things (not even during the years long series VII and VIII shitstorm, because most fans at least liked them) so there’s always room for pieces that will offer balance.

I guess it’s a slightly different matter when it’s a lone negative piece on a subject that doesn’t have something positive to offer balance, but it’s not something I’d worry about too much. But, then again, I’m not the magazine editor so I have the luxury of not having to make that call.What would be ideal would be someone who likes Rob’s stand-up to come forward and offer a review, too…

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“Went through the ganymede and titan website and was rather gutted at the fair amount of negative (some outright hostile) comments on him, it's all to easy to get nasty behind the window of anonymity that the @net gives these days :(” - Steven Gill